This blog is intended to serve as a repository for issues related to Design and a forum for this designer to share his perspective on the factors that have and are shaping the profession.
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Contact: myroncurtissmith@hotmail.com

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Apple's Latest Contribution to Altering the Way We Live

Now that the speculators have been proven correct, that Apple would introduce a tablet device, have they gotten it right?

The Kindle, Amazon's ebook reader and category leader, will probably suffer as a result of the Apple's Ipad greater design pedigree, greater functionality and approachable price point.

The predicted winners are content providers (i.e. publishers of books, magazines, newspapers) and of course Apple shareholders. It was a short ten years ago that Apple stepped in a space that the music industry refused to address constructively but instead chose to take legal action against consumers who wanted to share digital music files. Likewise, the print media industries struggle to recapture revenues lost to the internet, and Apple introduces a device and supporting software iBooks that offers a possible solution.

That restraint is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look. In his Palo Alto home years ago, he said that he preferred uncluttered, spare interiors and then explained the elegant craftsmanship of the simple wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, the 20th-century furniture designer and father of the American craft movement.

Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”